Gallery at Skidmore Place

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Gallery at Skidmore Place

WORKS

A collection of Susan Rothenberg's work comes together at Skidmore Place to create a unique viewing experience. Some notable works featured are Four Green Lines, 1984 and Between the Eyes, 1983-84. These two were breakthroughs for the artist as she discovered how to erase. Although these prints are lithograph woodcut, using this technique allowed her to work from dark to light, finding her images and figures within an established ground. Between the Eyes was also her first print to incorporate woodcut.

Rothenberg continued with her experimentation and pushed herself to new levels of discovery, with Missing Corners, 1984. The print resulted from a piece of wood she found, carved, and brought to ULAE. This then led to prints such as Black Water, 1985-86, and Stumblebum, 1986. Both images began with Rothenberg applying ink onto stones with her fingers, and removing it as she saw fit to enhance the image. Rothenberg then moved on to dedicating three years at ULAE to mezzotint, accomplishing four editions: Yellow Spinner, 1988; Three Parts, 1987-88; Mezzo Fist #1, 1990; and Mezzo Fist #2, 1990.

Four Green Lines, 1984 / Three Parts, 1987-88

Between the Eyes, 1984

Plug, 1983 / Mezzo Fist #1, 1990 / Black Water, 1985

Stumblebum, 1986

Three Parts, 1988

Listening Bamboo, 1990 / Red Bamboo, 1991

Listening Bamboo, 1990

Red Bamboo, 1991 / Blue Violin, 1986

Susan Rothenberg

Susan Rothenberg

about the artist

B. 1945 Susan Rothenberg attended Cornell University until the head of the department discouraged her from studying sculpture. She lived abroad for a year before returning to complete her undergraduate studies in 1967. After briefly attending the Corcoran School of Art, she moved to New York in 1969, where she continued sculptural experiments and began to paint minimalist-inspired geometric grids. In 1973 Rothenberg's frustration with such minimalist issues as flatness and anti-illusionism produced the first of the horse paintings for which the artist became well known.

While her first exhibitions of these expressive, painterly, and psychologically-charged iconic images were coolly received, by 1978, when she was included in the Whitney Museum of American Art's New Image Painting, her unique blend of abstraction and representation was seen as the herald of a resurgence in painting. In 1980 Rothenberg was included in the American pavilion of the Venice Biennale; in 1982 she was the subject of a one-person exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, and was the only woman included in the influential Zeitgeist exhibition in West Berlin. Traveling surveys of her work have been organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (1983) and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery (1994). Bill Goldston invited Rothenberg to work at ULAE after seeing her paintings in the Whitney Museum of American Art's 1983 Biennial Exhibition. Susan Rothenberg joined artists such as Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and James Rosenquist and won the grand prize at the 16th Ljubljana Print Biennial in 1985.